Footers

The Footers window puts certain information at the bottom of a web page such as the designer's credit, and as such you don't really need to use it at all. However, it does add a little professionalism to have some form of footer; this documentation has my name linked to my email address on every page so that if someone finds something confusing or doesn't agree with what's being said they can write to me easily; if this were a "proper" website they could point out mistakes or request information on a product without having to hunt through the site for a contact address.

It also stamps your identity on the site, it lets people know without confusion that this piece of information is copyrighted to X and was designed by Y, which should be somewhere on the site in case someone tries to rip off your work. If it's on every page, it's slightly harder for someone to claim they didn't know. This might sound a bit heavy and anti-Internet-freedom, but try designing a site and then have someone rip off whole chunks of it, layout and all, then pass it off as their own work and see how you like it. The joy at seeing your site linked to from a well-respected site is nothing to the despair of trying to get your work back from some unscrupulous rip-off merchant (especially ones who claim not to speak English).

So, to help you out there are four ways of adding footers to your webpage using HTML³, which can be as complex or as simple as you wish.

As with other sections, WML mode brings some restrictions such as not being able to do mailto: links to link email addresses to names, but apart from that I've tried to retain as much functionality as possible. In the future I hope to add 'phone numbers to the user details so you get a link that allows people to 'phone you instead of email! Other than that, alignment, images, even rudimentary rule offs and text sizes are attempted. And by the time you read this I hope that the HTML³ home page - http://www.goodwin.uk.com/richard/programs/html3/ - will be able to automatically adjust to different browser types so the link will work from WAP 'phones.

Controlling footers

At the bottom of the Footer window you'll see some generic controls; no matter which type of footer you're using these will always apply.

"Rule off before footer" will always put a horizontal line - <HR> - before all of the rest of the footer. This often makes the footer look neater;

the "Using !HTML³" line is context-sensitive; that is, not only will it change to reflect which type of footer you're using, but also if you're using the Full footer option it will sense how best to fit in with the rest of the text; so, if you have "Designed by <a name>" it will just add " and HTML³", whereas if you don't have any other design information it will put "Designed using HTML³ by Richard Goodwin".

Font size means you can change the size of the text the footer is rendered in; most people like this smaller than the main body text. If this is set to 0 (the default) then this function is switched off.

Alignment allows you to shift the footer to the left, right or center of whatever it's encased in (the page, or a table cell etc.); "Default" will just leave it alone (note: if you place it in a table cell make sure you move the </body></html> to the end of the file, don't leave it in the table!).

Quick footers

Of the four footer types, "Quick auto-footer" is, as it suggests, the easiest to use. Simply select this, place the cursor where you want the footer to appear and click "OK". The output will be something like this:

Email <a href="mailto:webmaster@argonet.co.uk">webmaster@argonet.co.uk</a><br>
Site designed by <a href="mailto:mabel@argonet.co.uk">Rich Goodwin</a><br>
</body></html>

The first email address is either your own or, if defined, the contact address for your profiled site; it's linked of course so people can just click on it.

The name after Site designed by is your "nickname" (whether this is your actual nickname, your company name, or your job title, depends on what you have registered your "nickname" to be), and is linked to your email address.

Obviously the other options, covered in the section above, will be added too if they're switched on (e.g. alignment, font size)

Full footers

The second footer type, Full footer, is a little more complex; it allows you to build up a footer, selecting which elements you want to implement and what addresses, name etc. to use. There's a handy menu for each section too, most of which are intelligently generated based on your own details and those of your profiled site (if you have any profiling information set); selecting from these menus automatically switches that section on so you don't forget!

On two of the sections, the contact details and the designer, you can fill in both the name and the email address; however, if you miss one out then the program will automatically compensate, so for instance if you just put a contact email address and leave the name part blank the program will use the email address for both linking and display purposes; if you just enter a name, it'll just show that name and not attempt to link anything to it.

Similar intelligence is used when deciding how to describe the way the site has been designed; there are several states, depending on whether you've put in details for who designed the site, what was used to design the site, and if the "Using !HTML³" line switch is on. Hopefully the program caters for all different combinations here, so you shouldn't be able to catch it out!

Finally, if you say that the site has been designed using a RISC OS, Microdigital or Acorn computer (ie. have RISC OS anywhere in the Using: section) then the computer part will automatically be linked to the relevant website. Only one option will be used, in order of priority (RISC OS, Microdigital, Acorn). This can be expanded later to include other manufacturers...

User defined footers

The third footer type is the user-defined section, with macros. Basically, you can type in the HTML for your own footer here.
"What good is that?" I hear you cry, "I could just type it straight into the web page directly!".
Well, using the User-defined smart footer section will allow you to put in tokens, in just the same way as you can put in date-related tokens into !Alarm (or use them with SYS"OS_ConvertDateAndTime" if you're a programmer). The standard date and time tokens are in place, but I've added quite a few more which will allow you access to various addresses and colours you've defined throughout HTML³; so, as you change the profile of your website, the footer changes with you.

For instance, you can change the colour of text to be the same as the link colour which will change as you use different colours schemes for various websites, or put in the email address of your client even though you might be switching between different site profiles every five minutes.

As you can see, defining this tokenised piece of code and running it on every site you design after that would save quite some typing!

Just as obvious is the fact that, as you have complete control over the tags and text output here you could output very broken WML (or HTML, or whatever), so on your head be it.

Button footers

The last footer type, "!HTML³ button", is pretty simple; it just allows you to use a graphic as an advert for !HTML³. Drop a graphic on there, and it will work out the size and filename (including relative filenames as with all files dragged to !HTML³). This graphics then gets wrapped up in a link back to my site, or if you switch on the '"Using !HTML³" line' it'll come out like this:

...plus four in WBMP format for mobile phones (shown here as GIFs because your browser won't do WBMP!)

Full(html3.wbmp)

Medium(m_h3.wbmp)

Medium, italic(m_h3i.wbmp)

Small(s_h3.wbmp)

(Obviously all the other options such as alignment come into play too).
Eventually there'll be a number of HTML³ animated icons available, and for your convenience these can be found by clicking on the button marked Find... - copy them out of this directory into your own web directory.

Self serving footers?

All this talk of buttons and links to go to my site might sound a bit self-serving, so I'm going to say right now that you have no obligation to link back to my site, say that you used HTML³, or anything else of that nature; so long as you don't claim to have written HTML³ yourself it's up to you!

However, I have been asked to supply graphics etc. and indeed the first one was designed by Andy Marsh rather than myself; as HTML³ is free I probably won't be receiving anything else from you, so some people feel the necessity to give me a link. I'm certainly not going to stop them.